EXCLUSIVE – A combined $3.1 million ad blitz by energy-bill supporters will target senators over the Memorial Day recess. The campaigns include: Vote Vets is spending $1.5 million, with a National Guardsman saying: “When I signed on with the National Guard, I did it to help protect America from our enemies … not to clean up an oil company’s mess.” (National cable, with versions running in Louisiana, Florida, Maine, Washington, New Jersey, Illinois and New Hampshire.) … A $400,000 buy targets Murray, Cantwell, Bingaman Udall, Conrad, Dorgan, Levin Stabenow, Collins, Snowe, Voinovich, Brown, Schumer, Gillibrand, Burris, Durbin, Baucus, Tester, Feingold, Kohl, Reed, Whitehouse, Widen, Merkley, LeMieux, Bill Nelson, Franken, Klobuchar, Warner, Webb, Scott Brown, Pryor and Gregg. … NRDC Action Fund is spending $200,000 in eight states -- Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin – with an ad saying, “Change shouldn’t be this hard.” … Americans United for Change and American Family Voices spends $400,000 on a TV campaign targeting Sens. McConnell, Vitter and Burr for accepting oil money.

BEHIND THE SCENES – E&E’s Mike Soraghan: “Minerals Management Service Director Liz Birnbaum … was in her office early Thursday, preparing to testify before an congressional panel about the agency's role in handling BP's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico … Someone from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's office called and said the secretary didn't want her to attend the House hearing. Following a harsh New York Times profile that highlighted her low profile in the crisis, that might have seemed like a bad omen. … She called Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, … to tell him she wouldn't be appearing. Moran called Salazar, who then walked out of his sixth-floor hallway with Deputy Secretary David Hayes. They went down one floor down and four hallways over to Birnbaum's office in 5400 corridor of Main Interior, and asked her to resign.”

Good Friday morning. A New Yorker cartoon this week shows a couple on a desert island, with the Gulf slick spiraling toward them. “Oil!” she says. “We’re rich!”

EXCLUSIVE – BIG SUMMER AHEAD FOR ENERGY LEGISLATION: Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled a meeting of climate/energy chairs (Kerry/Boxer/Bingaman/Baucus/Rockefeller/Lincoln) for June 10, and asked them to give him feedback on the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act by June 8. “Shows new urgency – feeling very good,” a Senate leadership source e-mails. Sen. Kerry met Wednesday with Phil Schiliro, President Obama’s congressional liaison, to discuss the floor schedule for the bill.

Other signs of life for the legislation:

--A bill is most likely to happen when/if the Fortune 500 demand it. And there were Ford, Google, PepsiCo and other biggies, signing a letter yesterday to President Obama and Senate leaders from 60 enviro groups, unions, trade associations and corporations: “It’s time for Democrats and Republicans to unite behind bipartisan, national energy and climate legislation that increases our security, limits emissions, and protects our environment while preserving and creating American jobs.” Read the letter

--President Obama pushed the bill yesterday in his opening remarks in the East Room: “If nothing else, this disaster should serve as a wake-up call that it’s time to move forward on this legislation. It’s time to accelerate the competition with countries like China, who have already realized the future lies in renewable energy. And it’s time to seize that future ourselves. So I call on Democrats and Republicans in Congress, working with my administration, to answer this challenge once and for all.”

** A message from America’s Natural Gas Alliance: A new Penn State University study shows that natural gas development in Pennsylvania will bring more than $8 billion in economic benefits and more than 88,000 jobs to the state this year - http://bit.ly/cC2E6Z **

TOP STRATEGISTS FOR BOTH PARTIES tell Morning Energy that we’ll know a comprehensive energy bill’s likelihood of passing after a June 10 vote on an amendment by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that would block the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Top Dems say if she gets over 50 votes, that’s BAD for the prospects of comprehensive energy legislation. If she gets 55 votes, that’s DEATH KNELL for the bill. Under 50, supporters are still in the ballgame, even thought the conventional wisdom is still against them.

COULD 6 MONTHS JUST BE THE START? – The president’s halt to new drilling at 33 locations in the Gulf of Mexico last for up to six months. But several top committee aides point out to us: a moratorium on offshore drilling is hard to lift.

THE HORSE'S MOUTH – House Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), on industry witnesses: “BP and Transocean are amazingly unknowledgeable in their inability to answer tough questions by committee members. ... We tried to find out these arguments on the rig, hours before it occurred, we could not find details or even knowledge of such an argument taking place.”

Leaders see new hope for energy bill -- Kerry talks floor strategy with Schiliro -- June 10 amendment will tip chances -- Gulf current shifts, Florida may be spared

YESTERDAY'S ACTION – House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) said in a statement after a hearing: “BP’s witness at today’s Committee hearing was unable to give adequately specific answers about what [claims] will be considered ‘legitimate.’” … Senate Energy passed Home Star 2.0 on a bipartisan vote (Bingaman, Snowe, Warner, Graham).

--WaPo A1, “Oil-leak gush hits record levels,” by Joel Achenbach and David A. Fahrenthold: “With mud continuing to battle oil in an attempted ‘top kill’ of the leaking well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the historic scale of the disaster became clearer Thursday when scientists said the mile-deep well has been spewing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day, far more than previously estimated. The new figure supports what many observers have assumed from the images of oil slicking the gulf surface, slathering beaches and spurting from a pipe on the sea floor: This is the worst oil spill in U.S. history.”

--NYT A1, “BP Resumes Work to Plug Oil Leak After Facing Setback,” by Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder: “BP on Thursday night restarted its most ambitious effort yet to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to revive hopes that it might cap the well with a ‘top kill’ technique that involved pumping heavy drilling liquids to counteract the pressure of the gushing oil. BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early in the day that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping the night before when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil.”

--FT A1, “Obama halts deepwater drilling in Gulf,” by Anna Fifield and Ed Crooks: “President Barack Obama ordered all 33 deepwater oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to halt drilling and extended a moratorium on new deepwater wells, as BP temporarily suspended its latest effort to contain the US’s biggest oil spill.”

--POLITICO, “Obama: The sludge stops here,” by Glenn Thrush and Josh Gerstein: “On Thursday, President Barack Obama’s damage control message was, I’m in control. … Obama kept repeating variations on that theme for an hour: the feds are in charge of the operation, not BP. He convened a meeting on Day One to plot the response to the leak. He’s briefed every day. He’s going back himself Friday. Surrogates weren’t getting the job done, so Obama took the podium to make his own case … But in the process, Obama sent a few mixed messages of his own. Obama bristled at the notion that the White House response has ‘lacked urgency’ – only to admit, minutes later, that planned reforms of the federal agency monitoring deep water exploration, in fact, lacked ‘sufficient urgency.”

--WaPo A1, “Obama struggling to show he's in control,” by Karen Tumulty: “A defensive President Obama sought Thursday to quell doubts about his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, insisting that his administration has been ‘in charge’ from the moment it began and bristling that critics who accuse it of being sluggish to react ‘don't know the facts.’ … This is the familiar Obama: resolute and in charge. But six weeks after the spill began, those words seemed to highlight the difficulty he has had in convincing the country that he is on top of the situation. As oil continues to foul the gulf, the conflicting signals coming from the president and his team have imperiled his reputation for competence and coolness in the face of crisis.”

MOOD OF THE GULF:

--Miami Herald, “Current shift could spare Florida of oil,” by Curtis Morgan: “A dramatic change in the Gulf of Mexico's loop current has trapped a slick of oil in a huge circular eddy that scientists said Thursday appears likely to push slowly west instead of pumping the oil south into the Florida Keys. The shift, which oceanographers have been watching strengthen for a week, has at the least reduced the imminent environmental threat for Florida. Tar balls predicted to be floating in the Florida Straits by now instead might not arrive for weeks, months or -- depending on lots of variables -- maybe at all.”

--St. Pete Times, “USF researchers find new underwater plume from gulf oil spill,” by Craig Pittman and Katie Sanders: “The sight of an oil slick spreading across the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is bad enough. But now scientists from the University of South Florida have found signs that a 6-mile-wide plume of invisible oil is snaking beneath the surface, in the deepest recesses of the gulf. The thickest concentration, they found, was more than 2 miles beneath the surface — a mile deeper than where the Deepwater Horizon well has been spewing oil for the past month — and about 20 miles northeast of the collapsed rig.”

--New Orleans Times-Picayune, “Top kill strategy to be adjusted to incorporate different clogging materials,” by Jaquetta White: “A day after launching the ‘top kill’ method … BP said Thursday that the maneuver has not yet been successful at stanching the oil flow. … [BP COO Doug] Suttles said BP plans to keep using the top kill … but will adjust the effort. In addition to mud, a combination of materials including dense rubber balls and other ‘bridging agents’ will be shoved down the pipe to help with clogging the leak … BP has observed ‘large amounts’ of mud escaping out of the riser pipe. … Mud traveling through the riser pipe instead of into the well is a concern not only for the success of the top kill procedure, but also because the mud, which contains solid materials, could erode the pipe, causing more leaks.”

** A message from America’s Natural Gas Alliance: One solution for more abundant domestic energy is staring us in the face. Natural gas is the natural choice—now and in the future. We know we need to use cleaner, American energy. And, we have it. Today, the U.S. has more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil, giving us generations of this clean, domestic energy source. Natural gas supports 2.8 million American jobs, most states are now home to more than 10,000 natural gas jobs. As Congress and the Administration look for ways toward a cleaner tomorrow, the answer is right here: natural gas. Learn more at www.anga.us. And, follow us on Twitter @angaus. **